SEO and Squarespace? Is this Really an Option?

Any feedback on Squarespace, SEO capabilites and ranking factors? I have a client wishing to use the platform and despite the good reviews, which appear to be from resellers by the way, the forums say not.

Although apparently Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz (yes right here!) gave them a big thumbs up “The square space team have put together a remarkable platform, SEO friendliness!

Really not sure here and don’t agree, there are many limitations and hosting with a template provider is always big no no.

23 Responses

I was prompted to write a response to this article today after helping a friend look into her Squarespace site. It's not like I expected it to have the equivalent of Wordpress' amazing Yoast SEO plugin, but I was at least expecting some nice control over metadata.

However, I discovered users have almost no control over the Title or Meta Description tags on the individual page level.

I even tweeted at SquareSpace support, and they admitted it was not an option yet (at least of 9/2/2016): https://twitter.com/SquarespaceHelp/status/771819238101176320

Right now, you can only add custom titles and descriptions on what Squarespace calls "pages" - but beware, not all pages are created equal. Blog posts are not pages. Neither are e-commerce products. My friend wanted to optimize her product page title tags, but she can't. So disappointing.

Fingers crossed that SquareSpace updates their CMS to maybe allow for this someday....

Hi Virginia - happy to give my $0.02. Basically, on SquareSpace 6 (the active version out now), I think they've done a solid job with SEO features and functionality. I actually consulted a bit (informally - not paid, just helping out because I want folks to provide good SEO, especially popular CMS') with the SquareSpace team, and reviewed some of their implementations. It's good stuff, and SquareSpace is a good company (good customer service, honorable folks, good about refunds, excellent with uptime, etc).

That said, you can certainly get more flexibility by hosting your own system. Wordpress enables a lot of this, especially if you have a good developer making changes to it. Out of the box, SquareSpace is friendlier on many aspects of SEO than Wordpress, but with customizations, the latter can exceed the former.

One last word of advice - be cautious about trusting all the forum chatter, especially the stuff that comes from SquareSpace v6 and earlier (which wasn't very SEO friendly). I don't mean to be a pure advocate/defendent of SquareSpace (and I have no financial or other interest in the company), but do want to be fair to the strides they've made.

Your last point really clinches it for me. Hosting with a template/CMS provider is something I'm really not happy with (especially given the price). I find the CMS and the resulting website very friendly to use and I think it's quite well SEO-optimised, but the limitation of hosting with Squarespace is just counter-productive to me.

Thanks for the confirmation Tom. I cant tell you how many clients/friends have wanted SEO help with Wix/Vistaprint/Webs etc.....and then they cant rank the site on Google. I even called up Wix once to be told that Google will just find my site if I have good content and no meta title etc.......not a chance! Thanks for the link.

How do you find ranking parallax sites though? I have been pondering this.

I second what Tom said on all accounts, Virginia. We've turned down a couple projects for clients wanting to use SquareSpace or helped convince them we could do the same work with a self-hosted WP site using cool parallax features.

Tom, thanks also for the link to ThemeForest. I haven't seen those parallax designs yet, so going to take a peak now!

It is a good product and I'm sure they are working to get all the exposure they can, especially from someone who's so well respected in the web world as Rand is. I would be doing the same thing with graces from an individual of his level :)

It happens that two of my clients are asking me to optimise a sqarespace website at the same time. With the first one I had an issue adding a meta description to the website without impacting the webpage content. Namely the meta description showed up as a hero image content and there was no was to change it, as it was a feature of the theme. So I added the meta description tag in the custom code area, but now I'm facing to have two meta description tags (one is empty) on each page. I did not even get to the posts seo on this client's website.

With the second client I discovered that the only way to add meta description is through the excerpt of the post. No other way. The title is coming form the post title and no way yo add a title different than that.

If this is a sqarespace theme issue, please let me know which one of their themes is without these issues. And Rand here is telling me that it is SEO friendly, It's not, not in these two cases at least. I advised my clients to leave sqarespace and go for WP. At least there are more options to solve seo issues with WP.

Hi Bijana - that's really frustrating and you have my apologies. When I reviewed Squarespace (which, granted, was 18+ months ago now), I didn't encounter that issue, but I also don't remember how deep I dove trying to update Meta Descriptions. I'd say it's definitely worthy of bringing up to their support folks, and for what it's worth, you can tell them I'd strongly endorse/recommend making that change, too.

I recently spent two months locked in my study creating my new website in SquareSpace. After a short learning curve, I found it quite user-friendly and created a website that I thought looked very professional and beautiful.

Unfortunately, I lost a lot of my SEO rank when I launched it about two months ago, and I've been trying to figure out what happened ever since. On-page optimization, 301 redirects for old pages, submitting a site map to Google and submitting the site for indexing has made little difference.

Then I found this:

Please check out Google Cache, text-only version for our home page (www.kanataskinclinic.ca) to see what Google sees. Here's what you'll find:

A LOT of duplicate content. So much it's crazy! Including mutliple title tags.

Sliders and carousels appear as the same phrase, written over and over again.

Image file names replaced by generic SS static names.

alt text that magically appeared out of nowhere, because I didn't put it there. (possibly drawn from the page description?)

Hi - it certainly looks like there's a number of issues around basic SEO friendliness and accessibility that need addressing on that site, but I'm surprised that SquareSpace's CMS doesn't allow for/enable that. Can you edit the source code on the pages? Or contact their support to look into it?

BTW - I'd also suggest making the homepage title more friendly. Currently, it looks like SEO spam - just keywords jammed together without spaces and without the name of the business. All the page titles have inherited this problem throughout the site.

If you're migrating from a site that uses special characters in their URLs (like bigfolio), you can't create individual page-to-page redirects. Squarespace doesn't allow special characters in their redirect syntax and there's no way to create a custom .htaccess file to work around that limitation.

No, actually there is no solution to the issues described above. Support is very limited and there is no work-around for these. The only way to change how the platform is working is by editing and customizing the theme yourself, which I have not done for my clients, afraid that the next theme update will ruin it all and make me redo the whole work again.

On the other hand if you have the limitations in mind, and you do not mind complying to those, you can build up a good website on Squarespase, but test the theme seo settings first.

I personally would never use Squarespace as a platform. The designs are great, but WP has so many great designs that can be purchased for little money and you can keep your WP website safe by being careful with plug ins.

Thanks for the reply - I have just about managed to convince the client that he should move his website http://www.cssgplc.com/ over to a new platform as I couldn't solve the issues easily for them, and their developers were not interested in finding a solution.

For anyone looking into this, I'd like to offer an update regarding Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. Squarespace has a huge issue in that many of the templates use the title tag and/or meta description to populate content overlaying the main image on a page. As you can imagine this is a HUGE pain in the neck when designing / optimising a site. I'm sure there are workarounds using javascript yet it is still troublesome.

Most of the on-page seo work done by our agency is done through HubSpot. We are not perfect, but we try to implement best practices suggested by Moz and HubSpot. Recently, we have had a few sites designed in Squarespace, and they are subsequently hosted by Squarespace as well. The templates are beautiful and the interface is quite user-friendly. However, we have experienced many of the aforementioned frustrations regarding the customization of the on-page seo. In fact, we are really having serious challenges with Google and indexed pages. We have submitted the sitemap according to the instructions and Google is only indexing 7 of the 72 pages (See attached image for reference). We have submitted the sitemaps of other clients, who are hosted by other platforms (HubSpot, Webflow, etc), and they are not having the same indexing issues that our Squarespace sites are experiencing. Has anyone else experienced this indexing issue with Squarespace? I have contacted Squarespace support, and they have given me the standard "it just takes time" answer. I am wondering if these indexing issues are related to the challenges mentioned in this thread.

Also, I thought we had customized our page titles inside of Squarespace, but I checked back after reading this thread. I see where the website name or name of the business is automatically added to the back end of each page title. I have also attached an image for reference. Is this what you guys are seeing as well?

If this is indeed the case, we will most certainly be migrating our sites over to HubSpot or other platforms that allow for more customized SEO.

Thank you for the helpful feedback. This has cleared up so much for me.

Yeah - I'd say the inability to customize the titles and meta descriptions is a dealbreaker by itself. That said, it shouldn't be impacting indexing -- could be that Google's crawled those pages but determined they don't have enough unique content, enough link equity, enough positive user/usage signals, or a combination of these, to keep in the main index.

At this point, though, I would probably consider migrating. Wordpress is still my first choice for the customization abilities, but Hubspot's a good one, too.

I'm having exactly the same issue as you, Jared. Our new site runs on Squarespace, but also utilises two Hubspot sub-domains to host our blog and certain landing pages. The Hubspot pages were indexed without a problem, whereas the Squarespace site just isn't indexing.

Confirming that there is no way to add a custom meta description to Shop pages on square space CMS. Dont understand why these folks dont take suggestions seriously when its negligence is costing its customers huge business!